It’s always fun to see how people build their home labs but I went exactly the opposite route.
I focused on energy consumption, because of cost and - gasp - wanting to be mindful about it given the current predicament.
Anything that needs to be on 24/7 is on a Pi, and anything that consumes more power is turned off by default (remote poweron possible).
For me at home there is zero need for redundancy and I use a cluster of four tini-mini-micro 1L PCs for my lab work. There are also turned off by default and are also low-power.
That's what I want to do as well, Pis running a vpn and some wake-on-lan scripts for a couple of old boxes (I will probably run SmartOS on those). Anything to share about your setup ? (blogs/gits that you wrote or followed)
I also got some cloud credits from my employer, but a bit paranoïd about putting my data there (although most of it isn't sensitive).
No links but it’s just a Pi5 as a Linux router and three Pi4s for grafana (iot stuff), jellyfin and hosting my blog on solar power.
If you’re thinking about rpi5, reconsider an n100 minipc. Rpi5 is surprisingly expensive, both upfront and tco.
I wrote a HN hit about something similar
https://louwrentius.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-is-no-match-for-a...
It's funny, I started with rPis for the same reason, but I'm about to replace them. I bought 20 rPi 4Bs for my homelab, and I just couldn't get them to do what I needed. I was looking to run a home k8s cluster and the Pis were just not suited to it at all (don't use sd storage for k8s 'cause it'll burn out the card w/writes, booting off usb was unstable even with powered usb hubs, netboot turned into an enormous pain in the neck).
If you have another machine with a SSD or at least a fast-ish HDD and want to give it another go, you could try running k3s with an external datastore (e.g. postgres).
That's the setup I've been using on 3 x rPi since 2021 and I'm super happy with it as I can host all my own personal projects, some OSS ones (changedetection, n8n, etc), even longhorn for distributed storage and still have capacity left -- and this with just microSDs (to be fair, A1s, but still).
Yes, I moved to 1L PCs for lab work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831